


For The Living

by Mab (Mab_Browne)



Category: The Sentinel
Genre: Episode Related, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-06
Updated: 2018-03-06
Packaged: 2019-03-27 19:28:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 515
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13887585
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Mab_Browne/pseuds/Mab
Summary: Jim irons a shirt. Blair watches. A tag to the episode Payback.





	For The Living

Of course Jim owned a clothes iron, which saw more use than his golf irons. He wielded it carefully over the light blue shirt.

“I always wondered if you had a dress uniform,” Blair said, from his lean against the kitchen island. “You didn’t wear it for Jack.”

Jim lined the sleeve up along the ironing board, and ran the iron down with a hiss of steam, leaving a crisp crease behind him. Then again on the second sleeve. The scent of hot fabric and a tinge of laundry detergent hung in the air.

“That was different.”

Jack Pendergrast , a vain, sharp-dressed man occasionally as venal as his image might have led you to assume, was ultimately true to the Department that had assumed the worst of his disappearance. For Jack, Jim had denied the pomp and circumstance of the official funeral service. He’d worn street clothes and sat with Emily as they’d both watched from outside the crowd – present, but distant, looking down on the sunlight and shadows as Jack had been laid to rest. 

For Mike Hurley, the spit and polish traditionalist who had betrayed nearly everything he’d sworn to the Cascade Police Department, Jim had brought out the Class A uniform – the shirt he was ironing with such precision, the dark blue pants, the tie, the high-peaked cap with its braid. For Mike, who was a burgeoning scandal in the news media, Jim would bring out the regalia of the thin blue line. It unsettled Blair, made the heat and scent on the air sickly to him.

“How?” Blair asked, and waited for his answer.

Jim put the blue shirt on its hanger and fingered the corner of its immaculate collar; testing its crispness, maybe.

“If we’d found Jack straight away – yeah, maybe I would have put on the uniform, but let me tell you something about him. If he could have sat up in his coffin and given the finger to everyone who thought he was capable of letting an innocent person die while he took the money and ran, that’s what he would have done. He would have said, ‘Slick, what the hell are you doing standing in line with those stuffed shirts?’”

“And Mike Hurley?” Blair thought of his leap to catch the bomb trigger, the sense of flight brought to a hard and breath-winding halt while his knees and elbows burned raw even through the protection of his clothes.

“Funerals are for the living. That’s the cliché, isn’t it?” Jim’s voice was as hard-edged as the creases he’d put in his uniform. “I’m honouring Mike for all the years that he did do the right thing. I can’t… I can’t let what he did at the end be everything.” He shrugged. “It was easier to be sure I was doing the right thing with Jack.”

“Better to do something than nothing, even if you’re not sure,” Blair said. 

Jim smiled. “Words to live by,” he said and took the shirt upstairs to wait with the rest of the uniform to honour what Jim had hoped Mike Hurley was.


End file.
